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sadom
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

physical switch

There are 6 esxi servers, each of them has 4 ethernet cards. There are 2 physical switches for redundancy in the environment. 2 of esxi servers will be used for vms and 2 for management and vmotion. Since I do not have network knowledge, I want to learn how to configure the physical switch. How are the ports connected to each other? What is the name of the protocol? Can you summarize what will be done on the physical switch side, such as: lacp will not be used due to vmware license.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Assuming that you will use Standard Virtual Switches (vSS) I'd suggest that you don't use any complex configuration, but stay with the defaults. Use e.g. 2 Uplinks for Management, and the VMs on one vSwitch, and the other two uplinks for Multi-NIC vMotion on another vSwitch, because vMotion on vSS can consume the whole available bandwidth.

Depending on how the physical switches are connected to each other, distribute the 2 uplinks for each vSwitch across the two physical switches. In case of low interconnect bandwidth between the physical switches, you may consider to connect the vMotion uplinks to a single physical switch to keep the vMotion traffic off the interconnect links.

Whether using tagged, or untagged physical ports depends on your network requirements. I usually configure the physical switch ports as tagged ports, and set the VLANs on the virtual port groups.

André

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sadom
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

General question, but this is what I want to ask. Which team decides the physical switch configuration in a newly installed infrastructure? Vmware admin or network admin? Actually, as vmware admin, this question is asked to me and I don't know the physical switch configuration

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alantz
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

How is your storage going to be configured, local I take it ?

--Alan--

 

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sadom
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

San switch for storage is in the existing infrastructure. storage will not connect to these switches

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swaheed1239
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hello!

You have to align with the network team as they will not be responsible for configuration on your virtual networking layer.

You should have basic understanding of vlans and port modes(Access/Trunk) and LACP to properly configure your virtual networking.

You need to give your requirements to the network team which has to align with your virtual network design. For example, how many vlans you need, do you need LACP, do you want to have tagged traffic or untagged traffic coming into your virtual infrastructure.

I hope this helps!

sadom
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

There are 2 physical switches for redundancy in the environment. 2 nic for virtual machines . 2 nic for vmotion and management network. I will create 2 virtual switches and make VLAN port groups for virtual servers. I will use standard switches. What configuration do I need to do on physical switches?

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